The New Order

LABOUR'S AIMS IN WAR AND PEACE--The Leaders of the British Labour Party --Rand School Press ($1.75).

Whatever other warring Britons think, British labor is firmly convinced that it is bearing the brunt of the war. In return it has every intention of blueprinting the peace. Its leaders, thanks to the war emergency, have vastly increased their political power. Therefore, the avowed aims and purposes of the British Labor Party, collected from recent statements and resolutions, make interesting reading. There are pronouncements by Laborites Arthur Greenwood, Herbert Morrison (Minister of Home Security), Philip Noel Baker, Clement Attlee, Hugh Dalton, Leonard Woolf and Harold Laski.

All are agreed on one point--Hitler must be liquidated before British capitalism, but not long before. Says soft-spoken Party Leader Clement Attlee: "Nazi aggression must be stopped, but something more is needed. . . . War is the result of an anarchic world system. Unless we can change that system, war will continue." British labor's work chart for changing the system and bringing in the New Order: 1) No dictated peace; 2) a federated Europe; 3) an international socialist super-government backed up by a super-police; 4) "Bold economic planning on a worldwide scale. . . ."

If this is intentionally vague, Marxist Harold Laski is specific enough. In the best-written piece in this collection, Laski explains labor's tactic so that even the dullest capitalist may read while he runs. Laski reminds British labor of Lenin's reasons for helping Kerensky defend Petrograd against General Kornilov. "It would be wrong," wrote Lenin, as quoted admiringly by Laski, "to think that we have departed from the task of the conquest of power by the proletariat. Not at all. We have approached much nearer to it; only not directly, but obliquely. And at this very minute, we must conduct our agitation against Kerensky . . . by demanding a most active, energetic and revolutionary war against Kornilov. The development of that war alone may put us in power." "That," adds Professor Laski, "is the strategy the Labour Party must consistently bear in mind."

One important section of Labour's Aims in War and Peace deals with the Soviet attack on Finland, which the Labor Party's official statement calls "bribery, deception, blackmail, aggression. . . ." In the Party's Peace Declaration the Russian attack is called "a shameless imitation of the Nazi technique in foreign policy." This is an important trend. Just as British appeasers were taken in by Hitler's anti-bolshevist policy, so most British labor leaders were taken in by Stalin's Popular Front tactic. That part of labor's self-deception, at least, is apparently over. If British labor proves as revolutionary as its words (and it never has), the revolution will at least be in native hands.

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